EVENTS

What about dentists?

Good thinking, South Dakota – pass a law allowing teachers to carry guns. That will for sure prevent the extremely rare phenomenons of a mass school shooting, and will for sure never lead to any commonplace oops situation in which a teacher flips out or fires the gun by accident. Uh huh.

Under the Republican-sponsored bill, school staff given permission to carry firearms on campus will be known as “school sentinels”. The state has given a law enforcement commission the task of establishing a training programme for the sentinels.

Several representatives of school boards, teachers and other staff spoke against the bill in legislative hearings, arguing guns would make schools more dangerous.

But sponsor Representative Scott Craig said this week had heard from a number of school officials who back it.

Mr Craig said rural districts do not have the money to hire full-time police officers.

While the teacher-shooting-a-kid is something that I’d be worried about and will most likely happen if something isn’t done to curb the ludicrosity of these kinds of laws and initiatives, I’m more concerned that a student’s going to get hold of a gun from a careless teacher or by overpowering them. Teachers aren’t police officers or prison guards, nor should they have to act as such, but they certainly don’t have the training necessary to prevent that sort of thing from happening. Where are they going to keep these guns? In a belt holster? Strapped to their chest. Watch what happens next time a teacher tries to break up a fight between two teenagers in South Dakota.

This does provide some benefits. There is an obvious first victim, you have to take out the sentinel before your murder spree which is useful for the gunman to know, also the authorities have a ready-made scapegoat to blame when there’s a school murder-spree that wasn’t stopped by the sentinel.

Bet they wouldn’t mandate arming abortion clinic staff, where the danger is at least as real as in schools…and how about Post Office clerks? the dog catcher? movie theatre managers? workers at Safeway? You just never know when or where some weapon-loving person is going to go on a rampage. Let’s just arm everybody then there’ll be no more shootings. Makes perfect sense to the non-sensible….

I’m more concerned that a student’s going to get hold of a gun from a careless teacher or by overpowering them.

That was my first thought, too. I pictured a gun being left in a desk drawer and a child finding and playing with it. It’s horribly easy to come up with dozens of other tragic scenarios. Some kids at my school (in a rural part of the UK) would definitely have the motivation, skill and numbers to take a gun off an unsuspecting member of staff. There were some extremely violent people there: one poured acid into someone’s eye in a science lesson, regularly beat people fairly severely. He tried to rape his social worker. He later pushed someone onto a railway line in front of a train (thankfully, no casualty) and was shortly afterwards jailed for stabbing his mother and then a police officer. He was also very influential among a certain crowd, a born leader.

I would not have wanted guns to be anywhere near that person. And this really wasn’t a particularly rough school.